


In which Tarvek faces the predictable outcome

by Overlord_Bethany



Series: blundering onward [13]
Category: Girl Genius (Webcomic)
Genre: Multi, OT3, Post-Canon, also some Jagers and the Castle and some ducks, there's a thing that happens that's no laughing matter but still I'm laughing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-08-26
Updated: 2017-08-26
Packaged: 2018-12-20 04:49:16
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11913555
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Overlord_Bethany/pseuds/Overlord_Bethany
Summary: I repeat: he did this to himself.





	In which Tarvek faces the predictable outcome

At the top of the stairs, Castle Heterodyne had finally made a little hatch, but no means of reaching it. Tarvek looked around for a ladder and, seeing none, he sat down on the top step. The Castle made a sound like a rumble of amusement. 

“Giving up?”

“Don’t be absurd,” Tarvek said, annoyed. That he had arrived early, that he preferred waiting to playing games today, was really none of the Castle’s business. He just wanted this self-inflicted atrocity to end. Swiftly. 

Castle Heterodyne taunted him, saying in its most singsong voice, “Don’t you actually  _hate_ —”

“You know I do,” Tarvek snapped. “Don’t you have something better to do than pointing out established facts?”

The Castle made a thoughtful noise. “I could smash the thing,” it offered. 

Cruel, yet almost sweet. “You don’t want to know what Agatha would do to you if you did.” Possibly something involving a flock of mechanical chickens. Hard to say, really, but it would be truly terrible. 

“Nooooo, perhaps not. Do tell me your day is ruined already.”

Tarvek scoffed. “You don’t regard me as anything more than entertainment, do you?” It was easy to forget, easy to believe that he and Castle Heterodyne had, if not a strange sort of a friendship, at least a basic mutual respect. 

“You happen to be a favorite,” the Castle objected, feigning offense. 

“A favorite toy is still a toy.”

Castle Heterodyne harrumphed and fell silent. On another day, a better day, Tarvek could almost believe the Castle’s displays of sentiment toward him to be genuine. He truly did enjoy the company of the great murderous machine. He found it persistently useful, and he even appreciated its theatrical sense of humor. Even so, as he climbed to his feet and he looked around for a way to open the hatch, he wondered just how much his own fleeting life could matter to a machine that had watched over the turning of centuries.

“You could ask,” the Castle said in a sullen undertone. 

The idea had not occurred to Tarvek, for he had assumed that an offended Castle would not open a door at his request. He drew a deep breath. 

“You don’t have to apologize,” Castle Heterodyne said. “I know you’re lashing out because you’re afraid.”

It had timed that last remark to obscure the sound of footsteps on the stairs. “Oh, don’t tell me I’ve hurt your feelings,” Tarvek scoffed. Too late, he heard. He started to turn, but his shoulder bumped against Gil, and so he remained where he stood, his eyes closed, waiting for a cutting remark from one or the other of them. 

“You’re early,” Gil said, and he brushed past as though he hadn’t showered tender affection on Tarvek mere hours ago. 

“Didn’t have much else to do,” Tarvek muttered. He thought of last night’s drowsy kisses, thought a little to much on drifting between sleep and wakefulness while Gil had held him and murmured charming nonsense. He tried to squash a sudden, sharp longing to return to that moment, to Gil’s happy rumble as the mattress sank down a little beside them, to Agatha squeezing into their embrace just moments before Tarvek lost his fight against sleep. He tried, and he failed, and he ached inside. 

A hand touched the small of his back, and none of it mattered any more. He drew one last deep breath before he turned, before he reached for Agatha and drowned in the nearness of her. 

“My love,” he murmured as she slid both hands behind his neck and pulled him close. “Have you come to bid farewell to a poor doomed fool?”

Agatha blinked at him. “I’m coming with you,” she said, her voice flat. 

“Ah—of course you are.” In his surprise and his altogether overwrought state… “I’m afraid I’d romanticized the moment,” Tarvek said, his thumbs moving in small circles of embarrassment on Agatha’s hips. 

“You always will.” Agatha pressed a swift kiss to the corner of his mouth, and then she broke away from him, heading for the hatch. The Castle raised a tight spiral of stairs before her, and Tarvek squashed a childish impulse to make a face at the nearest wall. 

Gil scrambled up at her heels, as though distrusting that the stairs would remain. Tarvek dawdled. He and the Castle both knew how Agatha would reprimand it if it left him behind, and he was in no real hurry to face his fate. He would not say he trudged upward, not quite, but it was a near thing. Up on the platform, he saw the flying machine, and he sighed. 

It was a different one. 

Of course Gil had built a new flier since last he saw it. He seemed to have a new one every week. Gil had already bounced to the wretched machine and thrown open the engine compartment, eager to show it off to Agatha. She gave a soft cry of delight, and she leaned over the engine. 

Tarvek closed his eyes against a wave of preemptive vertigo.  _I’m going to die._

While Agatha and Gil chattered eagerly over the engine, Tarvek forced himself not to drag his feet as he walked toward the machine. Dignity, he reminded himself.  He grasped the wing and he hauled himself up into the cockpit, where he amused himself by examining the controls. The configuration had not changed much since his terrifying escape from Castle Wulfenbach years ago, but Gil had added even more dials and gauges. Lovely. 

“Don’t touch that.”

Tarvek flinched both hands away from the controls and glared at Gil, who leaned over the side of the cockpit to point at a lever. 

“Unless you really want to disengage the brake,” he added, wearing that pugnacious Wulfenbach smirk of his. 

Tarvek arched an eyebrow at him. “Are you done flirting?”

Agatha hoisted herself into the seat to the other side of Tarvek, cutting off his last avenue of escape. “He was just showing me the latest improvements to the engine,” she said. “I was flirting.”

Tarvek shot a distrustful glance from one to the other of them. Gil shrugged and dropped himself behind the controls. “It looked mutual,” Tarvek said as the engine roared to life. He realized that he was trying to pick a fight to distract himself from the horror to come, but he could not manage to care. He felt the vibration running through the machine, felt the building energy, and he ground his teeth together into a grimace of dread.  _I did this to myself._

Gil’s hands manipulated the controls, and the infernal contraption shot into the sky as though launched from a slingshot. Tarvek only realized that he had howled a foul oath when he heard Agatha’s laughter beside his ear. Encouraged, Gil yanked the steering array, and they banked wide around the Doom Bell before sweeping back toward the river. 

Tarvek felt his fingernails digging into his palms, but he could not make himself unclench his fists. With a Mad laugh, Gil pulled one of the mystery knobs. The wings folded almost completely closed. They plunged toward the city below. Exasperated at the sudden feeling of  _déjà vu_ , Tarvek snapped his mouth shut on a scream. Agatha had half-risen from her seat, ready to smack Gil or take the controls herself—hard to say which—when Gil slapped the knob back into its initial position. The wings snapped open. He steered them around the top of a tree and they plunged lower still until the flying machine skimmed the surface of the Dyne, frightening all the ducks. 

“You’ll pay for that later!” Agatha warned over the rush of the wind and the roar of the engine, but Gil had fallen too far into Madness to heed her. He flew them right toward Tiny Monster Island at full speed. 

“Bad idea!” Tarvek yelped. “BAD IDEA!!”

Gil laughed his brightest, Sparkiest laugh. At the last second, when Tarvek shrank from the impending crash, Gil yanked the controls and the machine veered sharply to one side, one wing dragging in the water. Tarvek imagined that he could hear the monsters grumbling from the shore. Squeezed against his other side, Agatha also laughed, and Tarvek wondered at the both of them. 

They swerved around the island. Just before the bridge, Gil yanked the knob that furled the wings, and the flying machine skipped like a stone across the surface of the river. Tarvek gripped Agatha’s hand and squeezed until his knuckles turned white. If he made it through this ordeal without vomiting, he would count it as a minor miracle. They shot out from under the bridge, Gil slammed the knob back into place, and the wings snapped open, taking them upward once more. Had he breath enough, Tarvek might have complained that he thought they may have left some of his internal organs at the river below. 

Gil steered them toward the city walls. The smooth arc of the turn somewhat eased Tarvek’s horrifying mix of panic and nausea, but he knew better than to trust that Gil had finished showing off his machine’s agility. He glanced toward Agatha, and he saw her eyes shining, her cheeks flushed, her lips slightly parted. She was having fun. Of course she was. He stole a glance at Gil, only to find him grinning back. 

“WATCH! WHERE! YOU’RE! GOING!” Tarvek roared, and Gil had the audacity to laugh. Tarvek scowled and glared, which only encouraged him, and he may have heard a soft snicker from Agatha as well. Fine. His jaw clenching, Tarvek stared straight ahead and tried to force his heart to beat a steady rhythm. 

Gil took them in a broad, lazy circle around Mechanicsburg. Privately, Tarvek conceded that the spectacular view stole his breath away almost as surely as his thundering dread did. Franz waved at them twice as they passed by, and then Gil steered them back into the city. 

Agatha bounced in the seat beside Tarvek, she squeezed his arm and she pointed out landmarks below. He could almost relax and enjoy the moment. Almost, except that he felt no surprise when Gil ruined it by dropping them into a sudden, sickening dive. Tarvek refused to close his eyes, no matter how the rushing wind made them water and then tore his tears away. He refused to cry out as the Dyne loomed before them, large and hungry and coming on altogether too quickly. He choked on his resolve, and he swore loudly when Gil jerked the controls back, leveling out the dive just in time to kick up a massive spray of water behind them. 

“You’re a MENACE!”

Tarvek glared at Gil for laughing, for whooping his joy to the shining river, and he missed what happened next. A thump jostled the machine, Agatha yelped, and the engine squealed a protest an instant before it burst into flames. 

“WHAT DID YOU DO?!” For an instant, of all the ridiculousness, Tarvek’s thoughts flashed to Paris, to yelling those same words when he had to work with Gil in lab classes. 

“I told you so!” Agatha accused, and Tarvek wondered what she meant until a second wave of ducks hit the flying machine. The burning engine wailed, sputtered, and died. Grimacing, Gil steered them against the surface of the water. Tarvek stared dead ahead, suddenly still and numb. 

Agatha was up out of her seat, spanner in hand, ready to climb onto the fiery engine compartment. Gil swore. They skipped twice on the surface of the Dyne before a third impact came rough enough to throw Agatha back against Tarvek. Reflexively, he caught her and he held her as though he might somehow protect her. Laughable, but he could summon no mirth. The fourth time they hit the water, the machine failed to bounce back into the air. The wrecked machine tilted into the water, one wing dragging in the mud, spilling its passengers onto the bank of the Dyne before it ground to a smoking halt a little farther downstream. 

Tarvek stared up into the endless blue of the sky. The water of the Dyne lapped up to his waist, and he still held Agatha tight to his chest. So they had survived crashing. At least that was something. 

Agatha pushed free of his grip and splashed into the river to drag Gil ashore. And to give him an earful, apparently, about not harassing the wildlife. Tarvek blinked one slow, forceful blink, but otherwise did not move. 

“Hoy! Hokay down dere?”

At the familiar voice, Tarvek drew two deep breaths before he rolled his head back far enough to peer up the embankment. Jorgi grinned down at them. 

“Hy sent Rubin for towels!”

Towels. Tarvek felt the water soaking higher up his clothes, and he gave a tiny nod. Towels sounded like a good idea. He gave his digits a test wiggle before he pushed himself into a seated position. His coat made a  _schlorp_  noise as it peeled free of the mud. He cringed. 

“How about a hand?” Gil called up to Jorgi, who gave a dismissive wave. 

“Ho, no. Hy know better—”

“Jorgi,” Agatha said, “please help us carry salvage back.”

The Jäger grinned. “Vy didn’t hyu say so?” He skidded down the embankment and hoisted Tarvek to his feet. “Iz hyu salvage?”

Tarvek slapped his hands away. “I’m intact,” he said, finding his voice at last.

“Goot!” Cheerfully, Jorgi waded into the river to haul a twisted wing ashore. Tarvek shrugged out of his muddy coat and, with a sad sigh, tossed it aside before he followed. 

The machine had taken the crash surprisingly well. Suspiciously well. Seeing how little of it had been mangled beyond repair, Tarvek turned narrowed eyes on Gil, who blithely pulled sooty fragments from the engine compartment for inspection. 

“I need to install a bird shield,” Gil muttered to himself. 

Agatha poked him in the back of the head. “You need to leave the ducks alone.”

“Yez,” Jorgi agreed, tossing pieces of machinery on the riverbank. “Doze ducks iz mean.”

Agatha glanced at Tarvek. He shrugged. “I knew we were going to crash,” he grumbled. 

Gil dropped a handful of shredded feathers into the water. “That’s ridiculous,” he said, and for just a second, Tarvek saw the hurt behind his words. He sighed. 

“So,” he said, “next time no birds?”

“Not that you care,” Gil sulked. “You’re not ever coming along again.”

Up until that moment, Tarvek had assumed that Gil had been showing off strictly for Agatha. He stared, a little stupidly, while Gil returned his attention to the ruined engine. 

“Next time,” Tarvek repeated, “no birds.” Inwardly, he screamed at himself for his own idiocy, but Gil’s startled glance proved rewarding. Tarvek managed a smile, and Gil almost blushed. 

“Dey'z alvayz dis cute?” Jorgi asked Agatha. She beamed at him. 

“Cute enough to keep.”

The Jäger grinned at her. “Schmot, Mistress.” 

Rubin arrived with enough towels for them each to have five or six, and Jorgi enlisted him in helping to haul the wreckage back to the Castle. All the way back, Tarvek contemplated how he had become the architect of his own destruction. He would have to go flying again. 

At least this time he had decided to do it on purpose.


End file.
